Sports/leisure

Project summary

The Safer Neighbourhoods Sports Project is a comprehensive programme of activities delivered in the London Borough of Harrow. The activities programme provides a wide range of activities for children and young people aged 5-19 years old.

The main aims of the project include;

• reduce anti-social behaviour and youth crime involving young people
• encourage good citizenship
• provide training, volunteering and training opportunities
• improve community cohesion
• break down barriers between young people, the police and the wider community.
• early intervention for young people aged 5-11 years old.

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Project summary

Football for All has created a simple and effective educational model for exploring issues relating to community cohesion and social justice: Coaching with a Conscience.

The project utilises the powerful medium of professional football to encourage young people and adults from diverse faith, cultural, racial and social backgrounds, who may not otherwise mix, to engage with one another in informal educational environments in pursuit of a joint goal.

The primary focus of the project is workshop discussion on anti-sectarianism led by professional footballers, followed by a fun, inclusive, football coaching event for females and males. This formula creates an engaging atmosphere where old attitudes can be questioned and new ideas developed.

Fifa works with local authorities to ensure the transferability of the project, establishing which locations and community/youth/sports groups to work with in each local authority area, and any location-specific problems that need to be addressed.   

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Project summary

Football 4 Peace is an activity-based community relations initiative developed by the University of Brighton in collaboration with various partner institutions. Local sports coaches and volunteers work alongside each other bringing together, through football and aspects of outdoor education, children from distinctive communities in the Galilee region. F4p began in 2001 with two communities and 100 Arab and Jewish children. In 2008, it involved 24 communities and 1000 children in 9 different projects, including one for females only. The activities and coaching methodology devised by F4p promotes intimate interaction, allowing longer-term interpersonal relationships to develop, networks of sport development to emerge, and cross-community understanding to flourish. Aims to provide and promote:

• opportunities for social contact across community boundaries;
• mutual understanding;
• desire for and commitment to peaceful co-existence;
• sports skills and technical knowledge.

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Project summary

An annual football programme pulling Bristol Primary Schools together across the race and class boundaries that divide the city. A school can only enter by twinning with a school serving children from a different ethnic, class, faith or geographical background and forming a joint team.

Schools serving children from the diverse communities of Bristol are twinned. They come together for four joint training sessions in the lead-up to the tournament, two at each school, giving the children and teachers a chance to get to know each other. The children keep journals to help them reflect on and talk about their journeys. By the time we get to the tournament, the children have experienced friendships with children they might previously have been quite literally afraid of.

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Project summary

The project linked Muhammadiyah (2nd largest Islamic organisation in Indonesia) schools and Portsmouth local authority schools in a project based on the successful Pompey Double Club initiative funded by Portsmouth Football Club which offers remedial English language work coupled to football training to help motivate children failing in English.

With Pompey Double Club Indonesia the children are doing English as a second language so the demands are slightly different, although the motivation is the same. The project is based around English, sports (football and volleyball), soft skills training, ICT and communications (school linking). Children underwent 10 weeks of English, soft skills and sports training, followed by competitions and linking activities culminating in a visit to the UK where 18 Indonesian children participated in tournaments and cultural activities around the 2008 cup final attracting widespread media coverage, including a mention on Radio 4 by Neil Kinnock. 

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